Hillary Clinton, like a long and growing list of American leaders in business and government, left important digital data she was ultimately responsible for vulnerable to online attackers.

In that shortcoming, the former Secretary of State joins the heads of dozens of Fortune 500 companies — ranging from retailing giant Target to Sony Pictures — and the government's own Office of Personnel Management, which stores classified data on federal workers with security clearances.

So far there's no proof that anything of national import was stolen. Still, if this were a political column, one could argue that the report findings represent a large blemish on the resume of the former senator from New York who now wants the job of chief executive of the federal government.

Indeed, Clinton continued to use her private email account for occasional official business — and some of her aides used theirs in the same way on a daily basis, according to the report — even after a memorandum from within the State Department warned against it.

Given that China is widely believed to have stolen the OPM data, and is not the only country with prodigious cyber capabilities and a track record of using them for espionage, it was a warning worth heeding.

Yet for all the furor to come over the report, the growing threat of cyber attacks by foreign governments and international criminal syndicates against American interests will persist long after this political season.

In other words, whomever is sworn in as President next Jan. 20 will lead a country faced with a stark reality: as the Internet cloud swallows up a larger share of cyberspace, more American businesses and consumers are finding it harder to secure information they'd rather not share.

The threat goes far beyond official government business and extends to the U.S. economy as a whole. In October, the global consultancy firm Grant Thornton figured global cybersecurity losses at $315 billion a year. The CEO of British insurer Lloyds pegged the annual figure at $400 billion.

Sophisticated cyber attack technologies are proliferating globally, from the Chinese People's Liberation Army to the U.S. National Security Agency, within hacking groups like Anonymous to the 1,400 software companies that came to this year's RSA Security Conference in San Francisco.

Long after this election cycle, the risks of going online are likely to keep rising at least as fast as the opportunities. In a century when billions of social media users voluntarily post personal details to the servers of large tech companies, online privacy may come to be viewed as an antiquated notion.

Can you defend people who balk at online protection — until they get held hostage by ransomware?

Still, the long succession of successful hacks in the public and private sectors strongly suggest the next U.S. Congress should explore how to make consumers and businesses safer online, regardless of who is in the White House.

If the U.S. government can't keep American citizens, businesses or federal departments safe in cyberspace, there's an argument to be made that the job should be left to private industry.

Without a marked improvement in this nation's collective cyber defenses, we could end up in a world where all Americans — consumers, CEOs and politicians alike — discover that disconnecting important data from the Internet may be the last, desperate defense against having it stolen.

John Shinal has covered tech and financial markets for more than 15 years at Bloomberg, BusinessWeek,The San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch, Wall Street Journal Digital Network and others. Follow him on Twitter: @johnshinal.